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what weapon choices have people gone for?
my guardian is lvl 30 now, and for pretty much the entirety of my play time ive been hammer and scepter +torch. and from what ive gathered, im not good at doing anything to a high degree.

so ive decided to spend my day at work making pvp builds, as thats what im mostly interested in:

i find that guardians are pretty useless when it comes to ranged damage, so supporting those around i think is the way forward for WvW. and as for offence. i dont think you can match the sword build at this point in time for sheer damage. lost count of how many times the hammer has saved me from being killed once ive been in the downed state.

I've switched from my GS to a spirit weapon build with Sword+Focus yesterday and fell in love. It's still great damage wise and the spirit weapons add a lot to it. Just waiting till I can get my first gold so i can unlock the next tier of traits and the "spirit weapons don't destroy when commanded" trait.

I'm in love with the GS. Especially after realizing that skills 3-5 work in the combo field that is symbol of wrath. That is just amazing synergy.

What you have there sounds interesting tho, I'll have to give it a try later on.

PS Hello guardian thread, I'm newly converted to this wonderful profession. Sadly my mesmer is not what I wanted for pve so I'm going to play it mostly in pvp.

Since enemies spam bleed, poison and vulnerability, I tried to build it to clear as many conditions as possible. This is about as supportive a build you're going to get. I was level 80 when we run it, so you might not have all of the trait points at the level of the dungeon. Try at least to max out Honor, then put points into Virtues with Radiance last.

Pure of Voice with 30 points in Honor turns a condition into a boon on all allies that are affected by a shout, so it's an excellent starting point for a shout-focussed build. I put "Save Yourselves!", "Retreat!" and "Hold the Line!" for utilities, staggering their use to remove conditions whenever possible. Virtue of Resolve is reserved for situations in which many conditions are on several people or if everybody is spread out and not in shout range, which is 600 units and thus fairly small.

I've believe that "Save Yourselves!" with the trait removes conditions on the people affected before it transfers them to you, so it's actually very safe to use.

Virtue of Justice complements the build with the traits for blind on use and refresh on a kill, so you mitigate even more damage.

With this build our party barely had any problems with conditions, since they were removed almost immediately.

that's the built I've been running in PvE and the dungeon runs so far, switching the offhand to torch or shield when it's more useful. When going with a group I did replace "save yourselves" with "stand your ground" and the tome of Wrath with tome of courage.

It's a lot of fun playing this style, though I'm a bit on the low side on health. Apart from that it's mostly about kiting a hand full of enemies, spawning the spirit weapons and getting the enemies low on health, then spamming the virtue of courage whenever someone dies (I easily get might 9 stacks in most fights). Against the bigger group of mobs I spawn the Tome of Wrath and run in circles, spamming the #1 AOE.

For WvW I have yet to find my sweet spot, but so far I've had a lot of fun with the Tome of Wrath against Zergs.

I play sPVP mostly for a quick fix and never bothered studying builds. I tend to use a very similar style to what I've linked above with spirit weapons annoying the crap out of people and using the sword + immobilize signet to catch up with people and finish them off. Staff for support/line of warding. I'm usually winning the 1v1s but more than that and I have problems (also because I suck at sPVP and find it too chaotic/clumsy).

WvW is a different matter where in a focused group I can concentrate on stun breaking and boon application with sudden outbursts of burning all the things and killing those that stray too far away from the pack.

Picked sword because I'm tired of greatsword and shield because nobody is using it and also because that projectile blocker is awesome. Was aiming for high damage with good defense. Damage mainly coming from the crits. I took 30 points in valor for the increased crit damage and begrudgingly took Altruistic healing there, it's not optimal but should give some sustainabilty.

I'm not too sure about the 10 points in zeal. Putting it in honor or virtues might be alot more usefull. Also thinking some of the accessories can be switched to valkyrie because 69% crit is a bit too much.

That's a very interesting 1H build Deor. One virtue (oh dear) of going for the ten points in virtues is +10% boon duration. It might be worth at least going for 5 points in virtues, since Inspired Virtue is pretty strong. That said, Fiery Wrath is good too.

This is the WvW version, armour swap for dungeons would be Rampager rather than 'zerker as I'm going for power & condition damage; condition variation will come from Sigils rather than skills and the idea is reapply rather than long duration. This is primarily a support build though hence the AH; because I can't think of a way around it.

That said if anyone can think of a better way of doing this, let me know.

I was going to say that your build is not really good for a hammer, but now it looks much better.

Go Superior Aria as you are running 2 shouts and AH, that's your best regen, buffing allies.
I'd either drop the 10 in Zeal and 5 in Virtues and put 15 in Radiance with signet cd. Or go 20 virtues and get condition cleansing on VoR and improved consecrations (WoR is amazing traited as is sanctuary).

If you want to run a good 1h build, then spec meditations and get healing and cd reduction and better 1h damage.

I personally think you're wasting stats on condition damage. You could try a full-on burn build with spirit weapons, but that'll lose any support you could offer and probably be quite squishy.

I'm glad you're not going with the first build, that one greatly confused me

The problem with guardian condition damage is that it's limited to only burning, due to this only stacking in duration and potentially being overridden by others casting burning means that it's damage potential is pretty damn small compared to direct damage.

Even if guardian conditions weren't limited to just burning the gain from +condition damage is pretty much always lower than the gain from +power.
On top of that condition damage only synergises with condition duration, which for something like burning which can be kept up fairly indefinitely is pretty useless. This compared to direct damage giving +crit change and damage synergies with not only the damage itself but also procs (empowering might being a prime example) means that I can't ever recommend taking condition damage over direct.

I agree that you always need a base amount of damage, the question should be condition vs crit not condition vs power and the advantage that condition has over crits is that it isn't affected by toughness or weakness.

This problem I think this build has is that it needs 20 points in zeal, but if I did that it wouldn't be a support build any more.

I probably need to play around with the skills, I haven't really got the hang of using meditations, but they could well work.

Yeah, had the guardian a good way of putting down damaging conditions other than burning then I'd be more inclined to try it out but unfortunately that alone is going to be weak in any group setting due to the single stack nature of it.

A build focussing on burning is going to override the burns of other players and lower the damage of the group as a whole, be less useful against weaker mobs (including boss adds) and groups (unless you're traiting to aoe burn) and not be collecting the extra procs (keeping vigor up 24/7 in fights is one of the main things that keeps my guardian alive in certain fights).

On a pure numbers point it'll be interesting to run the maths, which I'll probably look up at some point.

At 25 might stacks in full rampager you have about 1800 condition damage. With full berserker you have about 900. That's 778 versus 553 DPS assuming 100% uptime (if this is correct). Meanwhile, you crit damage goes from 41% to 100%.

You're using on-block traits and altruism runes with Signet of Resolve instead of the low-cooldown Shelter. In general, a boon duration set provides more benefit to the group, especially with Empowering Might.

Also, you should forget about AH and put the 10 points into Honor for Pure of Voice. If you want to play support you might as well take care of conditions for the party. Of course torch has a cleanse, but try aiming that at allies in combat.